“’You are unleashing certain things in a human being we don’t allow in civic society, and getting it all back in the box can be difficult for some people’, said William C. Gentry, an Army reservist and Iraq veteran who works as a prosecutor in San Diego County.” (Sontag, Deborah)

As the United States erects borders and infiltrates more and more countries with its military, it is chilling to see the effects of choosing violence over nonviolence. Today’s New York Times article entitled “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles,” states that 121 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been involved in a killing after returning home. The stories are heart-wrenching because everyone is a victim. Sadly, peace is not a choice we make after war happens. Nonviolence must be the means if it is to be the end.

Martin Luther King voiced it this way in Loving your Enemies..

Another reason why we must love our enemies is that hate scars the soul and distorts the personality. Mindful that hate is an evil and dangerous force, we too often think of what it does to the person hated. This is understandable, for hate brings irreparable damage to its victims. We have seen its ugly consequences in the ignominious deaths brought to six million Jews by a hate-obsessed madman named Hitler, in the unspeakable violence inflicted upon Negroes by bloodthirsty mobs, in the dark horrors of war, and in the terrible indignities and injustices perpetrated against millions of God’s children by unconscionable oppressors.

But there is another side which we must never overlook. Hate is just as injurious to the person who hates. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

It is startling to look back on the last 50 years of American history and cringe at the spiraling cycle of hate from WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Our nation, as well as our soldiers, suffers from PTSD. How can we pay men and women to travel to other countries to engage in actions which will endanger their lives, their minds, and their souls, yet has never been proven to work and in fact has done exactly the opposite? We shiver to imagine the future of a world which continues to up its use of violence.

“’Seth has been asked and required to do very violent things in defense of his country,’ Captain Tiffner wrote. ‘He spent the majority of 2003 to 2005 in Iraq solving very dangerous problems by using violence and the threat of violence as his main tools. He was congratulated and given awards for these actions. This builds in a person the propensity to deal with life’s problems through violence and the threat of violence’.” (Sontag, Deborah)

In this century, we must dust off the proven theory of nonviolence and assert that it is not only the effective tool of the African-American girl marching in a civil rights demonstration, but also the path to diplomacy and lasting peace in the Middle East and the Midwest. Nonviolence is much more than the civil disobedience of Gandhi’s satyagrahis; it can also be a national policy which works with the opposition to create two winners and true progress. Nonviolence cannot be solely left to those of impeccable character like Martin Luther King, Jr., or the ascetics like Gandhi, or even the ornery curmudgeons like Henry David Thoreau. We have seen enough; it is high time the United States and the United Nations take the lead in truly employing nonviolent strategies not just in conjunction with military power but in stead of violence. Nonviolence is more than civil disobedience, noncompliance, more than sit-ins and hunger strikes, more than boycotts and speeches and marches and voting. It is love in action.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear…” (1 John 4:18a, NASB)

On June 27, 1950, the United States invaded North Korea, attempting to bring democracy to some 9 million individuals under the rule of the communist Soviet Union. The Vietnam War was supposed to bring democratic ideals to the 80 million Vietnamese Muong, Hoa, Khmer Krom, Dao, Tay, Thai, and Nung. Both conflicts in Iraq presumably sought to bring freedom and democracy to the some 20 million Iraqis, though an estimated 2 million have fled this democratic startup process.

The professed aim of bringing democracy to unwilling or unwitting peoples, though, must be little more than a euphemism. It has rarely, if ever, worked, and most times it brings hardships to already beleaguered people. Additionally, our nation has turned a deaf ear to some 12 million individuals living within our own borders who are themselves crying out for democracy and human rights. If our government were to pass some form of immigration reform, it could begin the nonviolent process of bringing democracy to 12 million extralegal citizens who are currently residing in the United States and are already contributing to our GDP and our MTV.

How can our nation not become greater by adding 12 million freedmen to its 303 million currently? It is estimated that 12 million Africans were brought to America as slaves. When these African-Americans were freed, our nation changed drastically and was forced to address its own injustices. Had these African-Americans not been freed, Martin Luther King and his nonviolent civil rights movement may not have happened and our country would not have become greater for it. It would be ruinous to expend vast resources attempting to deport even a fraction of the extralegal residents currently in the United States; therefore, we must concentrate our resources on the few who do not wish to become legal, who are not working toward the American dream, who are not self-sustaining and motivated. Our Border Patrols and Homeland Security could have manageable tasks if we reduced the number of undocumented residents in the United States through immigration reform.